Nikolas 'Atrus' Coukouma wrote:
Using @rel with any linking element is perfectly valid and has been for
years.
@rel not being supported for anything other than the link element itself
has also been an outstanding bug for just as long. There's lot of debate
attached to at least one Mozilla bug (#57399 [1] - filed on 2000-10-20).
Can we agree that this should be supported, but currently isn't? Unless
there's a compelling reason not to, I think we might as well allow
autodiscovery via either element. Any implementation guide should
recommend duplicating the information in the interest of autodiscovery
actually working.
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57399
-1 to saying in the spec that you can use either element, and in the
guide saying to use both if you want it to work, not just look pretty.
As I remember it, when RSS autodiscovery started this cowpath,
aggregator developers generally didn't have an SGML parser handy, and
weren't especially happy about the idea of having to write their own
HTML parser. Finding one (or a few) of relatively few links in the
first bit of the document feels a lot easier than having to look at
every a in the whole document.
Now? I'd say most don't have an SGML parser handy, and won't be
especially happy about writing their own HTML parser. It's fairly rare
for someone to comment out bits of their head, and quite common for
them to comment out huge swaths of their body, including things a
template came with, like a href=../xml/index.atom rel=feedAtom
feed/a, with no thought that something will be seeing and using that
invisible link with an incorrect path. I added Atom autodiscovery to my
current aggregator, Feed on Feeds, with a ten second copy/paste/change
mime-type of the results of it using a regular expression on the HTML.
If instead I had to correctly parse the entire HTML document, I'd...
switch to something in Python, I guess.
Then, since I foolishly took the Firefox bug for better autodiscovery,
I'll also need to do it where I do have an excellent HTML parser, but I
have to do it on every single page that every single Firefox user loads,
whether or not they have any interest in feeds, or subscribed to the
feed ten thousand loads of that particular page ago. link is easy,
we've got a DOMLinkAdded event and most pages have very few of them.
a? Well, the performance hit probably won't be noticeable on most pages.
Phil Ringnalda
